Dear Prime Minister

03 July 2025

 

Rt.Hon Sir Keir Starmer MP,

Prime Minister,

10 Downing Street,

London,

SW1A 1AA.

 

Dear Prime Minister,

Thank you for your letter of 5 June, attached, responding to my letter of 14 March.

I regret to say that despite what you say in your second paragraph, that you are committed to supporting business, your words are not born out by your actions. In the year that your government has been in office, you have done even more to destroy incentives to start and run small businesses than any government in the 40 years since I started this business. It is not surprising that one sees high levels of suicide and mental stress amongst small business owners.

In reading your letter I realise that you clearly don’t have a clue about how business and commerce work, you also seem to have a very naïve view of human nature. To think that you are writing the legislation that is going to define how we try to run our businesses is quite frankly terrifying.

Please understand the following:

1. A business can only operate if it has customers, without customers there is nothing. ‘The customer is King’ is as true now as it was when the adage was first uttered. Without customers there is no employment, no wealth generation, no pay rise, no employment rights, nothing.
2. As the customer pays the wages, if a business is uncompetitive the customer will go elsewhere.
3. A business will not survive, long term, without making a profit – the difference between total sales and the cost of those sales pays for everything required to run the business: rent, rates, wages, employer’s NI, heat, light, transport, maintenance, interest on loans etc. Anything left over after this is then available to invest in the future and for corporation tax. The higher the profit, the higher the corporation tax take. No profit, no wages, no pay rises and ultimately no employment.
4. An employee’s maximum risk is that he / she might lose their job. An employer’s maximum risk is that he / she might lose their job, their business and in many cases their home, if it is used as collateral with the bank.
5. Employment law has over the last 30 years become more and more complex, with more and more “rights” being given to employees so that it has become a complete nightmare trying to chart a way through.
6. Every human being / employee is different with different needs and circumstances, and one person’s flexibility is in many cases someone else’s extra load.
7. To already difficult circumstances you now propose an Employment Rights Bill, extending to virtually 1000 pages, to make employees “happier & healthier”; what naïve bollocks.
8. The vast majority of businesses walk a fairly narrow margin between profit and loss, changes in one or two aspects of the business environment can be the difference between making a profit and a loss.
9. Successful, profitable businesses grow and employ more people, failing businesses shrink their employment. Employing people is a positive for society, yet when was an employer thanked for providing profitable employment?

For one, most employers like me and my fellow directors are also very much full time employees, and we will certainly not be happier. Everything we see in this Bill is simply an activists’ charter, where those with a grievance of some sort will have legal protection to disrupt the employment of others and the viability of the business they work for.

You say in paragraph 3 that you “plan to make work pay”, we all want this to be the case. However, we operate in a very competitive world economy where customers will only pay what they judge to be a fair price. However much we might want to pay employees, we are limited by what the customer pays for their purchases; no amount of legislation is going to change this. The Employments Rights Bill is going to instead add cost, meaning that the profit available to pay wages and develop the business is further reduced.

“By strengthening the underlying framework that supports our workers, we are making work more secure and predictable, making wages fairer, and strengthening the foundations that underpin a modern economy”. This sentence took my breath away, and I say this as someone who is probably not counted as a ‘worker’ in your sight, despite probably doing 60-70 hours a week. As I have tried to explain previously, work can’t be made secure and predictable and to state this is a lie. I as an employer cannot guarantee to any employee, including myself, secure and predicable employment – all businesses are dependent of having enough customers. We also have costs over which we have almost no control, like the increase in employers’ National Insurance and high energy costs. These have somehow to be mitigated by reducing costs. I hear you say: put up prices, which is easy and essential to maintain margins. But if it makes the business uncompetitive, the business shrinks and employment again can’t be secure or predictable.

Paragraph four is again naïve twaddle. The whole approach of your policy is rule setting for employers, tying their hands and removing their flexibility. What can be more ridiculous is that a business advertises a role that requires office attendance for 40 hours a week. The job is offered and accepted by the new employee, as advertised, but on day 1 they come into work and demand to work flexibly form home. Giving “Rights” that only some people can benefit from is very unfair, through your “white collar” prism workers can work flexibly because they are pen-pushing or working on computers. In an engineering business like ours where customers require products to be despatched the same day and the carriers come in at times set by where we are on their route, machinists, repairers, pickers, packers and order processors have to be on site all the time. It is simply dishonest to hold out the promise of flexible working. An agricultural contractor can’t let staff work flexibly – they are in many cases driven by the weather. Claiming, as justification, that a minority of employers break the rules, this is a tiny minority that can be dealt with under existing legislation. By creating all this extra law will simply mean that more of us will end up breaking it, in part because the number of heffalump traps for us to fall into will have grown many times over. Those running businesses are juggling so many plates already before they even try to actually make a success of the business, that introducing yet more legal requirements to their lives is not going to reduce their existing employment law nightmare.

You claim in paragraph 5 that you recognise the importance of small business to our economy. I wish this were true. If you did, you would not have applied inheritance tax to business assets; you would not have hit us with a minimum of a £600.00 hike per employee in employers’ National Insurance, or overseen the steady increase in energy costs.

The whole approach employed by your government is to try and legislate us all to be happy employees. Not only is this a false promise it is also counter-productive. You can legislate for employers to do all sorts of things, but if there is no business there is no employment.

To achieve your aim to “Make Work Pay”, we need to create the environment where successful businesses thrive. This creates a much more dynamic labour market where there is greater competition in hiring. There are key policy areas that must be addressed to achieve this:

1. Employment law has to be simplified with less micro management.
2. A bond system has to be reinstated to prevent vexatious tribunal claims. The system at present means that anybody who is sacked, even in our case for disciplinary reasons, is stupid not to make a claim against their former employer even if they are in the wrong.
3. Immigration must be reduced to a number that matches emigration.
4. Business red tape has to be reduced.
5. Out of work benefits have to be reduced, the millions who are not working will only take up work when they have to. We operate in an area with high unemployment, but like almost all employers in this area have great difficulty filling vacancies with good people.
6. Reverse reductions in Business Property Relief and Agricultural Property Relief.

You also need to remember that employers / business owners are human beings too, they have to be allowed to enjoy the reward of their risk. At the moment they are ignorantly regarded by many connected to government as ‘rich’, those with the broadest shoulders etc. What drives them to work to build a business has to be understood before formulating legislation, and there is nothing in your letter that gives me any indication that you have a clue.

The vast majority of new businesses fail within the first six months, so why do people give it a go? They think they can make a success of working for themselves, and that they can give themselves and their family a better future. One of the big drivers can be a desire to build up enough to educate their children privately, however, you are working hard to take away that aspiration through another dishonest policy.    Entrepreneurs don’t have to risk their business idea in the UK, even if it might be home. Nobody has to set up in business, and they only will if the ‘seedbed’ is attractive.

You say you want economic growth. We all want economic growth, yet you believe that this will be helped through smothering business in an almost 1000 page “Employee Rights Bill”. When will you actually listen to those who run the actual organs of the economy, that have provided the growth and wealth of the country in the past? Why don’t you learn from history? The last time we tried this sort of legislation, the economy crashed and burned in the 1970s with record high unemployment. In the 1980’s and 90s, through deregulation and tax reduction, there was a massive growth in business formation and development that rapidly soaked up the unemployment many thought would be permanent.

Please stop this very damaging legislation before it is too late.

Yours faithfully,

 

Alastair MacMillan

Director

 

CC: Rt.Hon Jonathan Reynolds MP, Rt.Hon Rachel Reeves MP, Rt. Hon Angela Rayner MP & others

 

Alastair MacMillan runs White House Products Ltd, a manufacturer, distributor and exporter of hydraulic components to over 100 countries. He is a supporter of the Jobs Foundation.

 

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